Search

Patti Niehoff

I am in here.

Oysters

I intended to write last night about the stories my Dad had told me about being in the war, either war. It ended up with him talking about oysters and how much he loved them.

They as well as clams always made me sick, going all the way back to my younger years when we would be on a road trip — possibly the road trip we made up to Notre Dame for a weekend football game. We stayed overnight at a Howard Johnson’s and, of course, ate there. They had clam strips on the kids’ menu and I ordered those, only to be vomiting into the toilet a few hours later that night. And so, I was a little more drowsy and uninterested in the football game the next day than I had planned on being. Everybody loved the game, and I did enjoy it more than I thought I would. Being in a huge crowd that is that excited about something passes on a good deal of the excitement to you. It’s almost impossible to resist.

I remembered how Dad loved the little smoked oysters in a can as well. Every long once in a while, he would get a can of those and open them on Sunday for a treat after skeet shooting — these definitely were not a summertime treat. They’d be eaten on crackers, or possibly right out of the can in my father’s case. I preferred the sardines that came out of similar cans. Both of these cans were flat little things not much bigger than index cards. Their tops were rolled off with the help of keys that were attached to the bottoms of the cans.